


Pranked across Time and Space

by OnyxReed



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Brotherhood, Brothers, Canon Compliant, Family, Friendship, Gen, Headcanon, Magic, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 02:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5317004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnyxReed/pseuds/OnyxReed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Papyrus was pranked in a manner that defied the laws of the universe seemed like a slip of the mind. The second time was strange. On the third time, he simply could not ignore the curious nature of Sans’s ability any longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pranked across Time and Space

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here: http://marxistpapyrus.tumblr.com/post/134233866236/pranked-across-time-and-space
> 
> This is my first Undertale work; just something that I thought up while I was thinking about how I find Papyrus to be a lot less naive than the fandom generally makes him out to be.

Some would call Papyrus’s fixation upon his action figure collection to be strange; however, without fail, the skeleton would check over his collection every day at the same time, to the bemusement of his brother. Their sudden move to the cozy, wooden shack in Snowdin changed absolutely nothing of his routine.

He was an easy target for the house pranker: scheduled, predictable, and seemingly-naïve.

The slender skeleton made his way up to his room as he always did, his eyes glancing to the table upon which he stored his prized collection of action figures. He expected to see exactly what he always did: the figures labeled and standing in their proper order from the date on which they were obtained and approximate height. What he saw was a cyclonic mess, the telltale sign of his brother’s presence.

“Sans! What did you do to my figure collection?” he yelled out, voice reverberating around the house in his clear expression of discontentment.

Within an instant, without his footsteps being heard, Sans rushed to his room, the same expression of mirth plastered upon his face. Papyrus seemed surprised that his brother was capable of moving so quickly and without any noise as to detect his presence. He blinked before shaking his head, ridding himself of his shock so that he could obtain the perfect visage of annoyance.

“I know that this was you, Sans. Nobody else even knows about my room, let alone my collection, and nobody else would leave such a horrible mess!”

“Okay, okay, I know,” the stockier skeleton replied with the same Cheshire grin as usual. He waved a hand in dismissal. “I won’t do it again, bro. I promise.”

Papyrus gave off an annoyed “hmmph,” crossing his arms and looking away with a brow raised.

“If it’s any consolation, I would help you clean it if I knew that you would want me to help.”

“You? Clean?” Papyrus shook his head. “No, no, no. There is a particular order that you will not be able to achieve, Sans. Allow me.”

And, with that, the older of the two nodded, saying something about going to Grillby’s that went through Papyrus’s head, unanalyzed, as the younger began to clean the mountainous mess.

Naturally, it would take a matter of hours. Sans went to Grillby’s and came back four times in the course of Papyrus’s cleaning. He cleaned each figurine individually, remade and reapplied their labels, and placed them perfectly in order, even going so far as to assure that they were parallel to the sides of the table. Everything had to be absolutely perfect. In a matter of time, everything was almost perfect, until the slender skeleton noticed that one figurine was missing.

“Sans, did you take one?”

No response. That could mean several things, but Papyrus took his bets and guessed that Sans must have been asleep. But where?

The younger brother, through a stroke of miracles, was correct in his first guess: He opened the door to his brother’s room with the key that he always kept with him, and he found Sans sleeping amidst the putrid, folded-up ball of dirty sheets that always made him turn his face in disgust.

“Sans, wake up!”

Even as he was awoken from his favored slumber, the older of the two smiled the same smile as always. “Hmm? What’s wrong?” His voice was only groggy for a moment, but it seemed to snap back to its usual drawl within an instant. Odd.

Papyrus let out a long sigh, gesturing towards his room with one hand while pointing an accusatory finger towards Sans with the other.

“My fifth generation Froggit action figure is missing, Sans!”

The smaller of the two skeletons sat up now, rubbing the back of his skull so that the gritty sounds of bone sliding on bone reverberated in his small, cramped, odorous room. He blinked, a slight chuckle leaving his mouth and causing his ribcage to waggle up and down. “No it isn’t. You’re holding it right now!”

“What are you ta-“ Within an instant, Papyrus looked down at his hand. The long, slender phalanges were grasped around something. He opened them up, and he saw nothing other than the fifth generation Froggit action figure. He stared at it for a long time, as if in disbelief. He brought his other hand to touch it, hearing the slight clatter of his other index finger tapping on the acrylic finish. He held it close to his face and smelled it, as if that would do anything.

“Wow, erm, this is embarrassing.” He sputtered the words with a lack of confidence in reality that the great Papyrus rarely found himself facing. Could it have just been a slip of the mind?

“Yes it is.” Sans resumed his favorite pastime: sleeping.

 

A week in Snowdin passed by before the two brothers took their first positions as sentries. It was in this time where they both learned the fine art of puzzlecraft. They both had to know, down to a T, the very concepts that would confound the human mind. The difficult part of that was that neither of them had ever, of course, met a human, and the cynical whispers heard from the older, more-skeptical townsfolk in Snowdin suggested that they might never.

Despite the obvious challenge, Papyrus seemed to rise immediately. Within the first few days, he had set up what he believed to be quite an elaborate maze of puzzles throughout the forests between the doors to the Ruins and the entrance to his beloved, new town.

Sans set a new record for the number of sentry breaks to Grillby’s in a single week.

Both brothers were incredibly proud of their accomplishments.

One puzzle, in particular, was incredibly special to Papyrus. Of course, it was simply a prototype, so it would be arranged again and again. However, as he aligned the ice and rocks in the perfect shape to match the contours of his face upon the white, snowy patch, he knew that this was going to be his favored piece. He had to show Sans.

Papyrus beamed with pride as he gestured towards the puzzle, one hand on his hip while the other moved as he pointed out the parts that made it the most interesting. “You see, Sans, the object of this puzzle is to turn all of the X’s into O’s. The human would do this by stepping on the space. However, if they step on it more than once, the O’s will turn into triangles, and they will fail the puzzle. It is foolproof! However, the best part is that it is shaped into the glorious visage of yours truly.”

He brought his other hand to his hip, his smile gleaming like the snow on the ground. Sans matched his grin with the same one as always, but Papyrus could hear a low hum reverberating in the back of his skull.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked, looking down to his shorter brother with a paranoid curiosity.

“I don’t understand, bro,” he pondered, looking over the puzzle as he tapped the tips of his fingers against his exposed shin bones. “That face doesn’t look like you at all.”

Papyrus gasped shortly. “Are you mocking my artistic prowess, Sans? I will have you know that you could likely do no better!”

“No, it really looks more like me, now that I really see it.”

“That is nonsense! Brother, we look nothing alike!”

However, as soon as Papyrus lifted his eyes from Sans’s cheeky countenance to view his masterpiece once more, the frame of the ice blocks and boulders appeared shorter, rounder, squatter. The eyes were much larger, and each one had pupils. However, most noticeably, the ear-to-ear grin of his brother was incredibly prominent.

“Sans, how did you-“

Papyrus looked down and to his side to address his brother, a stern, yet confused visage prominent on his face, but he saw nothing more than an empty patch of snow. Not even the marks of his brother’s slippers remained implanted upon the ground.

 

Papyrus tried not to think upon the oddities of his life, often dismissing them as coincidence or as a slip of his own mind. However, he started to form connections, and all of these links trailed back to his brother at the very center. What was Sans? What was he capable of doing? Papyrus had questions, but he did not have answers. The skeleton hated such a lack of resolution, so he found the easiest answer in dismissing the curiosities as circumstance.

However, one day, it was impossible to ignore the facts: Sans was pranking him across time and space.

Papyrus rarely accompanied his brother on his oh-so-frequent excursions to Grillby’s. However, one day, a break sounded so enticing as he felt exhaustion creeping into his bones and hunger into his head, so he agreed. He stepped through the door, and he immediately regretted this decision. The grease stains everywhere made him cringe. He could hardly hear himself think over the loud noise.

Despite the initial impression, Papyrus grew fond not of Grillby’s but of its customers. Everyone seemed to know him. They didn’t only know his name, but they knew of him fondly. They knew of his hard work as a sentry. They knew of his collections. They knew of the pictures that he posted on UnderNet, and they even knew of his happy attitude. He remained among this crowd, socializing with his brother by his side for what felt like hours.

“It was lovely to meet you all, but I really should be getting back to work now,” Papyrus announced, a hand on his chest with pride swelling in his posture.

“Already? Well, that’s that work ethic that Sans tells us about,” one monster commented.

“Yes, well, you can keep up with my work if you follow me on UnderNet. It’s COOLSKELETON95, remember?”

Several whispers rang across the bar area as they reached for their phones to follow Papyrus. Within that moment, he was only twenty-five away from double-digit followers!

“Yeah, we’ll see you next time, Papyrus! I always love it when you come in.”

The skeleton had been walking out of the restaurant, practically shooing his brother so that he would come along, as well. However, as he heard this, he paused in his place, his brow raising. “I’ve… only ever been here once.”

The same monster chimed in once more. “Really? I could have sworn that I’ve seen you here at least once or twice before.”

There were nods of agreement across the room, even a slight smolder of agreement from Grillby himself. Papyrus could only look on with absolute bewilderment.

“Well, see ya in about a half an hour, everybody!” Sans announced as he exited. Papyrus could only follow along in his confusion.

As they made their way back to one of Sans’s many sentry stations across the forest, Papyrus straddled the line of caution between questioning that event and leaving it behind him. That could not have been incidental. He knew that his visit to Grillby’s was his first – and now, he would strive for it to be his last.

“Sans, why did they all think that I was there before?” he asked, looking down to his brother with an accusatory look.

The shorter skeleton stopped in his place, slippers sinking into the densely-packed Snowdin snow in a manner that spoke to the weight of the big-boned Sans himself. He turned around on the balls of his feet, craning his head up to face his brother. Papyrus could only look back, glancing down and viewing the cheeky Sans through his periphery.

Sans made no motions for a few moments. Then, he brought his head forward slightly and cocked it ever-so-slightly to the side. He seemed to be stressing an implication that was a mutual understanding of the two brothers: He knew that Papyrus was fully aware of his abilities. It was only a matter of coaxing it out of the entanglements of a normative understanding of reality. In short, Sans had to twist time and space, and Papyrus had to accept his re-invention.

Step one, completed.

Step two?

Papyrus furrowed his brow. “You are so immature.”


End file.
